little puppet show too.
Normally it takes me a day or two to develop a talk. I never speak from notes, but I normally have a
visual presentation and an idea of what I want to say. Not this time. A puppet show would have been
easier. I was paralyzed for weeks over this presentation. Nothing was working.
One evening, about two weeks before the event, Steve asked, “How’s your UP talk coming along?”
I burst into tears. “It’s not coming along. I don’t have shit. I can’t do it. I’m going to have to fake a
car wreck or something.”
Steve sat down next to me and grabbed my hand. “What’s going on? This isn’t like you. I’ve never
seen you unravel like this over a talk. You do these things all the time.”
I buried my head in my hands and mumbled, “I’m blocked. I just can’t stop thinking about this
horrible experience that happened several years ago.”
Steve sounded surprised. “What experience?”
“I never told you about it,” I explained. He leaned toward me and waited.
“Five years ago I bombed a talk like I had never bombed before or since. It was a total disaster, and
I’m so afraid that it’s going to happen again.”
Steve couldn’t believe that I had never told him about my disastrous experience. “What in the hell
happened? Why didn’t you tell me?”
I got up from the table and said, “I don’t want to talk about it. It will just make it worse.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me back to the table. He looked at me in an I’ve-been-waiting-my-
whole-life-to-use-your-line-against-you way. “Don’t we need to talk about the hard things? Doesn’t
talking always make it better?” I was too tired to fight, so I told him this story.
Five years ago, when my first book came out, I was asked to speak at a women’s networking lunch.
I was so excited because, like the UP Experience, I would be speaking to a group of “normal” people
—not therapists or academics—but normal businesspeople. In fact, this event was my first normal
audience group.
I arrived early at the swanky country club where the event was being hosted, and I introduced
myself to the woman in charge. After sizing me up for what felt like an eternity, she greeted me with a
stack of short pronouncements. “Hello. You don’t look like a researcher. I’m going to introduce you.
I need your bio.”
It was an uptight twist on “nice to meet you too,” but okay. I handed her my bio and that was the
beginning of the end.
She read it for thirty seconds before she gasped, turned to me, and peering over her reading
glasses, snapped, “This says that you’re a shame researcher. Is that true?”
All of a sudden, I was ten years old and in the principal’s office. I hung my head and whispered,
“Yes, ma’am. I’m a shame researcher.”
With her lips pursed, she popped, “Do. You. Study. Anything. Else?”
I couldn’t tell her.
“Do. You?” she demanded.
“Yes. I also study fear and vulnerability.”
She shrapsed, which is like a combo shriek and gasp. “I was told that you collected research on
how to be more joyful and how to have more connection and meaning in our lives.”
Ah ... got it. She didn’t know anything about me. She must have heard about me from someone who
failed to mention the nature of my work. Now it all made sense.